All the Things You Are

Where D♭ major goes to D♭ minor and then C minor, that C minor 7 belongs to A♭ major, so a student’s D natural in it was wrong. A very good pianist in Italy played that C minor 7 as if it were in B♭, and Barry called that wrong too.

Brian Jude de Lima, Reanimating Dissonance: Cultivating the Antecedents of Barry Harris’ Concept of Movement as a Multidimensional Pedagogical Tool for Ontario Post-Secondary Jazz Curricula ¶887Brian Jude de Lima, Reanimating Dissonance: Cultivating the Antecedents of Barry Harris’ Concept of Movement as a Multidimensional Pedagogical Tool for Ontario Post-Secondary Jazz Curricula ¶888Brian Jude de Lima, Reanimating Dissonance: Cultivating the Antecedents of Barry Harris’ Concept of Movement as a Multidimensional Pedagogical Tool for Ontario Post-Secondary Jazz Curricula ¶890

Behind this is counting keys. He asked the class how many keys a C minor 7 belongs to, and warned that you cannot treat every minor 7th, or every major 7th, alike: work out which key the chord is in and play that key’s scale.

Brian Jude de Lima, Reanimating Dissonance: Cultivating the Antecedents of Barry Harris’ Concept of Movement as a Multidimensional Pedagogical Tool for Ontario Post-Secondary Jazz Curricula ¶888Brian Jude de Lima, Reanimating Dissonance: Cultivating the Antecedents of Barry Harris’ Concept of Movement as a Multidimensional Pedagogical Tool for Ontario Post-Secondary Jazz Curricula ¶890

In the same lesson he passed on Monk’s name for the half-diminished chord, a minor with the sixth in the bass, and explained it as a minor four going to five and then one, not a two-five, just as a D minor 7 is really a major four.

Brian Jude de Lima, Reanimating Dissonance: Cultivating the Antecedents of Barry Harris’ Concept of Movement as a Multidimensional Pedagogical Tool for Ontario Post-Secondary Jazz Curricula ¶889Brian Jude de Lima, Reanimating Dissonance: Cultivating the Antecedents of Barry Harris’ Concept of Movement as a Multidimensional Pedagogical Tool for Ontario Post-Secondary Jazz Curricula ¶890

He also used the tune to borrow diminished notes, putting notes from the diminished chord in place of chord tones as he played through it, and told the class to practise the sixth diminished scale. In the same class a student played B♭ minor with the sixth in the bass, borrowed the diminished note below it, and moved the voices between the minor sixth and its diminished.

Borrowed diminished notes on All the Things You Are0:002:286:487:208:26

To Barry the tune meant Charlie Parker, who played it so prettily as Bird of Paradise; he linked it with Bird, Diz and Bud until he heard Coleman Hawkins play it. When Hawkins called it, Barry spent the time trying to steal his phrases instead of comping, and it showed him there was more to play than bebop.

Interview: Bird, Hawkins, Monk and New York10:08Barry Harris on WKCR-FM ¶124Barry Harris on WKCR-FM ¶399Ted Panken, For Barry Harris’ 82nd Birthday ¶23

In Rome in 2017 he told the same story to make a wider point: after hearing Hawkins on it, even Bird came down a little for him, because nobody has played everything; music, like math, has no end.

Music is like math1:121:47

When Barry recorded it, George Duvivier told him he was glad Barry played an A half-diminished where most players use an A minor 7th. To Barry the 7♭5 simply made more sense: he works by logic.

Believe: a talk to musicians17:5719:0819:43